Only the Strong (34 page)

That first night with Percy, when she sat with him near the Soldiers, he encouraged her to imagine the concrete, bench-ringed plaza as a body of water. “See the light dancing serenely on the surface,” he said, “see the rippling currents.” His voice was hypnotic, seductive.

“I used to marvel about boats,” he said. “I love their beauty, their sublime usefulness. I used to tell myself that one day I'd have a boat of my own, maybe even live on it. I can think of few human inventions so wonderful. Somewhere near the dawn of civilization, an ancestor pushed a hollow log into the sea and climbed inside. And from that simple act, transport became more than walking or wheels, more than moving with the ground always beneath you. It meant steering by the stars, depending on the wind. Seeing new worlds, new people. Sometimes just floating. Floating.”

Watching him, listening to him, Charlotte promised herself that she wouldn't fall too easily, that she'd make him work. She'd just gotten to college and she had big plans. How dare he lure her so brazenly, with his imagination and his dreamy language?

“Time passed,” he continued, “and we turned wonders into weapons, just like we do everything else. We used them to carry blankets infected with smallpox, dragged people in chains into nightmares they hadn't imagined, loaded their decks with cannonballs and bombs. All of that ugly history began to ruin my visions of serenity. It occurred to me that dreaming of boats might possibly be better than actually having one. So here I sit.”

Surprising herself, Charlotte asked him if a slave was better off dreaming of freedom instead of actually being free.

He looked at her a long moment. “Shut my mouth,” he said with a smile. “I knew you were trouble.”

B
EFORE
A
NANIAS
G
OODE SHARED
his swelling fortune with his best friend Miles Washington, enabling the man of God to build a sparkling new edifice for his flock, Good Samaritan Methodist Church occupied a smaller building on the eastern edge of North Gateway. Back then, neighborhood regulars called it “the children's church,” because its front steps were known as a place where an unwanted infant could be safely deposited. That durable tradition likely prompted unknown hands to leave a baby girl, just two weeks old, on those very steps in 1952.

Charlotte had no memory of that, of course, and the adults who'd brought her this far in the world had not encouraged her to dwell on the unfortunate circumstances of her earliest days. She did reflect upon them from time to time, such as when she sat down at the Jones family dinner table during her high school romance with Ed, or when she spent a joyful weekend with Laurie Jo's bustling clan. Mostly, though, she saw no point in trying to hold on to such potentially dispiriting details. There was more value, she discovered, in letting them go. She said as much—wrote
it, actually—in the essay that secured her a full scholarship to River Valley A&M.

“Old people talk like it takes years and years of living before you can start talking about memories,” she wrote. “But I've lived so much and taken on so many memories that if I could, I would forget just about everything. That's wishful thinking and I don't waste much time with that. Wishing, I mean. For most of my life, thinking's all I've had.”

It was her precocious thoughtfulness, or rather the suggestion of such qualities on her infant face, that first caught the attention of Miss Shirley Griffin, the church secretary who discovered the wriggling bundle in a basket on the steps. “Look like she's thinking on something important, don't she?” she said to Rev. Washington as the two of them admired the church's latest foundling. Miss Shirley had already washed and changed the baby girl and fed her from the bottle of formula that had been stuffed alongside her in the basket. She had wrapped her in one of the many blankets that the church kept on hand for precisely such events.

“Well, she definitely has something on her mind,” Rev. Washington said, smiling. “Any clues as to how she came to us?”

“No,” said Miss Shirley, “except for this.” She held up a woman's kerchief. It was a souvenir of sorts, with names of North Carolina cities embroidered on its rayon surface. “She was wrapped in it.”

“Hmm,” said the reverend, examining the scarf. “That will at least give us a name for her if nothing else.”

Miss Shirley frowned. “Raleigh? Caroline?”

Rev. Washington chuckled. “Of course not, Miss Shirley. Charlotte. It has to be Charlotte.” He took the infant in his arms. “Welcome to the world, little one,” he said. “May God's abundance be yours.”

Babies left in Good Samaritan's good graces acquired last names reflecting the godly protection that had ensured their safe arrival. Accordingly, kindergarten teachers at the neighborhood school were seldom surprised to look at their class lists and find a Paradise, Blessing, or Providence tucked among the Smiths, Joneses, and Johnsons. Gazing at little Charlotte's glowing brown
face, Rev. Washington decreed that her appearance that morning had been nothing less than Divine.

Those little Paradises and Blessings, so fortunate to land in the cushioning embrace of Miss Shirley or some other capable parishioner, often found that God's protection didn't necessarily extend beyond the church walls. Some of them indeed joined households that weren't yet complete until they arrived, creating families bound and sustained by an all-abiding love. Others, like Charlotte, became rolling stones who passed under many roofs without ever finding a place that could truly be called home.

Throughout her journeys, Charlotte held on to the scarf. She carried it carefully from foster home to foster home. Even on occasions when she ran away, she was mindful of it. When Artinces learned of its significance, she convinced Charlotte to have it framed and mounted on the wall in her bedroom.

Her bedroom! Charlotte had never enjoyed her own space. She appreciated everything Artinces had given her—the car, the clothes, the kindness. She was especially grateful for the room. She had endured many roommates by then, though not long enough to ever form a genuine friendship. At college, Laurie Jo was a terrific roommate, but Charlotte tired even of her sometimes, craving the solitude of her bedroom in Gateway City. Like Charlotte, Laurie Jo could speak fondly of the virtues of privacy. She had shared sleeping quarters with her sisters until adolescence, when her parents mercifully allowed her to claim four walls of her own. But she had alternatives even then, including her parents' spacious back porch, and their yard, big enough to include a swing set and a seesaw. She shuddered when Charlotte told her about waking covered in a bedmate's sweat, piss, or worse, and she smiled appreciatively when Charlotte bragged about the dimensions of her room in Artinces's house. “Is it warm?” she once asked. “Warm?” Charlotte replied. “I bet you could fry bacon on my desk.”

Laurie Jo laughed. “It's wonderful to feel safe, isn't it?” Charlotte knew her friend meant well, but her smile vanished just the same. “I could never feel safe,” she said. “There's no such thing. Not for me, anyway.”

She explained that instead of a strong father who shooed away strangers, she'd had a foster parent who pinched her, squeezed her, and wiggled his tongue at her whenever his wife's back was turned. Instead of a mother who sewed dresses, she had a skinny, nervous woman who never stopped smoking, reeked of beer, and kept little in her refrigerator except a jar of mayonnaise and a tin of sardines. When she got older and lived in the relative security of the children's home, Charlotte was nearly raped behind the old Comet Theatre on Washington Boulevard. A shortcut behind the shuttered cinema turned out to be a mistake when a growling stranger dragged her down from behind.

“I fought back,” she told Laurie Jo, “but he was too strong. I thought it was over for me.”

“What happened?”

“This man came out of nowhere and saved me.”

“Thank God,” Laurie Jo said.

“Thank Guts.”

“What?”

“Guts. I found out later that his name was Guts.”

After Guts Tolliver stomped her assailant to a bloody pulp, all the while urging her to run away without looking back, Charlotte kept to herself even more than usual. She avoided Ed and everyone else, wrestling with a conclusion that was as sickening as it was perhaps inevitable: somehow, it all had to be her fault. The perverted foster fathers, the would-be rapist, they were attracted to her because of something she was doing. Was she giving off a scent? Showing too much flesh? She turned her collar against men's ugliness by trying to make herself unattractive. She decided they would see little of her besides her eyebrows.

She began to wear men's hats and men's jackets big enough to drown in, thinking they would smother whatever signals she was transmitting, throw predators off her trail. She couldn't bring herself to cut her hair, so she wound it into a single long braid that she tucked into the back of her shirt. Her costumes may have
turned off a few men and prompted wisecracks from some of the clueless coeds on Sorority Row, but they never fooled the PeeWees of the world, who sniffed after her anyway. Nor did it dissuade Percy, who claimed he was dazzled by her beauty the first time he saw her. As their relationship warmed, he told her that not even a croaker sack could distract from her good looks. “You'd climb out of that sack just like Venus rising out of that shell,” he cooed. “One look at you and Botticelli would have dropped his brush.”

One thing about being dumped on a doorstep is you lose all your blood connections, not just your mother and father. At first Charlotte hung on every word when Percy shared anecdotes about his grandmothers, especially the one he called Mama Ruth. When he misbehaved as a young boy, she'd make him cut a switch from the weeping willow tree in her front yard. After dozens of such stories, Charlotte's fascination turned to envy and she couldn't wait for him to shut up. Charlotte also resented the pictures of grandmothers published in
Ebony
magazine. Gray haired, honey voiced, probably smelling like sweet potato pie, wire-rimmed glasses dangling from a chain. The closest she ever came to having a grandmother was when she was nine. That year, she was kept by Mrs. Speight, a foster mother who also provided day care for toddlers in her small, neat flat. Unlike many of Charlotte's guardians, Mrs. Speight was a straight shooter with no criminal tendencies. Her one vice, if you could call it that, was watching
Let's Go to the Races
on TV. Perched in her threadbare easy chair with Charlotte sitting at her feet, she dozed off during the Kroger grocery commercials, then sat up suddenly at the blare of the starter's bugle and the racetrack announcer's loud “and they're off!”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Charlotte's time with Mrs. Speight inspired a brief but intense fascination with horses. Her bookshelves in Artinces's house included
Misty of Chincoteague
,
King of the Wind
, and other remnants of that obsession. When Mrs. Speight died of a stroke, Charlotte was again left to her own devices. For months afterward, Charlotte rode horses in her dreams. Sometimes she was astride a wild stallion, thundering across an island plain. Other times she was a jockey clad in colorful silks and
Mrs. Speight was the announcer, rousing the crowd to an excited roar as Charlotte urged her horse toward the finish line without ever raising her whip.

Mrs. Speight would have made a great doctor
, Charlotte thought as she wheeled her Malibu onto the Abram H. parking lot. It was Mrs. Speight who showed her how to hold a baby, how to burp it and bathe it, how to use the rhythm of her own breath to calm it down.

Sharps ate pie like a pig. All that effort that he put into appearing slick and smooth fell by the wayside as soon as someone slid something sweet under his nose.

Sitting beside him in the Eldorado, idling in the alley behind Artinces Noel's house, PeeWee wished he had discovered Sharps's weak spot earlier. He'd have him eating out of his hand by now instead of scooping cold lemon meringue from the pan and stuffing it into his mouth like a Third World toddler in a starving-orphan commercial. He could barely look at him, and the sound of his munching was equally annoying.

At least the preoccupation with pie encouraged Sharps to ease up on all the lecturing. PeeWee took advantage of Sharps's distraction to take out the ring and enjoy its weight in the palm of his hand. He was so sick of Sharps constantly criticizing him that he had half a mind to just put on the ring and beat the piss out of his needle-nosed ass right there in the alley. But he knew he had to wait. It wouldn't be smart to lose his cool on the edge of their big score. But once they'd pulled it off and divvied up the loot,
pow!
He'd become one with the ring, and the whole North Side—maybe the whole world—would know his power.

A car pulled up behind them and flashed its headlights. After spotting it in the rearview mirror, Sharps put down the pie and wiped his hands delicately on a silk pocket square. He pulled his toothpick from his breast pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and glanced at his watch. “'Bout fuckin' time,” he said.

The emergency room was strangely quiet. Passing through, Charlotte took note of a handful of patients, none of whom seemed to be suffering from anything more traumatic than an aching stomach or a sprained ankle. She noted the relative calm with faint surprise, half-expecting to see the entrance clogged with screaming ambulances, rushing paramedics, and frantic people. Despite its notoriously inadequate budget, Abram Higgins was the best in the city when it came to handling gunshot and stab wounds. The staff had become so proficient, the joke went, because North Siders gave them more than enough practice. Charlotte had anticipated seeing a few stragglers from the Afro Day event, revelers whose enthusiasm for beer and excitement had exceeded their capacity for self-control. But as she left the emergency ward and walked the long corridor leading to the well-baby center, all was hushed and as close to serene as a building full of sick and injured people could be.